"Although the .NET vs. Java war is basically over for control of the Windows desktop, where .NET is sure to become the managed language of choice for new Windows desktop applications, there is a new battle brewing. That battle is for the Linux desktop. Now that Java has been open sourced under the GPL, even the most strict of the 'free software only' distributions can start bundling it and integrating it into their Linux distributions out of the box."

> Though I wonder if the performance issues are
> really invalid. Imagine a window manager,

There actually are a few window managers written in Java. And really, there are no performance issues with them at all. Again, keep in mind Java does intelligent runtime analysis and looks for areas of code that are too slow, and then compiles those down to native code.

Remember that a typical computer program spends 95% of its time running 5% of its code. So the deal is optimize that 5%, and don't worry much about the rest of it.